To the Young Poet
IT IS A QUESTION easily asked and often glibly answered. What advice would you give a young poet. Rilke wrote a bunch of letters in response. I was asked once in an interview in Wales and I said, I think: “Read. Go outside. Fall in love.”
I found a bit more to add to that advice in a long conversation with Denise O’Hagan, published in The Blue Nib, Issue 44, 31 December 2020. I commend that interview to you. Worth taking a look at ahead of my upcoming online poetry masterclass, What the Light Tells.
Denise asked great questions about poetry and climate change, about poetry and politics, about poetry and identity discourse. I may publish a few pieces of it here in riffs and plaints to come.
But for now, seven or so tips from a poet for whom writing a poem still feels like learning all over again to drive a manual, each time.
“THESE TIMES are troubled, like all times, but in their particular way. Singing and dancing and praying in company are out apparently, so those are off the table for now. But my respectful advice to young writers remains what it always has been.
1. Read a lot: poetry from all times and cultures and from now.
2. Don’t be ambitious for you; be ambitious for poetry and for your work.
3. Don’t join. Clubs and tribes are bad for writers. But do care. A great deal. About the earth. About music. About justice and dignity. About poetry.
4. Go outside. Discover the real estate: the Land, the weather, the geology, the world of meaning of which the human is only a part.
5. Love.
6. Study form and technique. Literature, poetry in particular, is old and long and wise. Take your time, and keep practising. Go to school; learn all the rules you get to break later. On the other hand, don’t wait till you’ve got it all down. You never will. Write and fail as you study. Fail again better tomorrow, as Beckett put it.
7. Get a sense of humour if you don’t have one. These are serious times. Deadly serious. Poetry is play with language. Serious fun. If Horace is right, we need to delight, as well as to school. Practise joy. We need as much of it as we can get.”
